The breakfast meeting was scheduled for 7:00 a.m. at the Wheatbaker, one of Lagos's most discreet luxury hotels. Elian arrived at 6:45, deliberately early, and took a seat facing the entrance. Old habits from years of corporate survival—always control the sightlines, always know who's coming and going.
He'd spent the night reviewing documents, guided by the System's warnings and Femi's increasingly sophisticated intelligence-gathering. The Helios Capital offer had seemed legitimate on the surface. British-registered, billions under management, a respectable track record of African investments. Their representative, a smooth Nigerian-British woman named Folake Soyinka, had been persistent—calls, emails, messages through intermediaries.
When she'd finally proposed this meeting to discuss "
